Ian Somerhalder waves to his fans while making an appearance on Extra on Wednesday (April 23) in Universal City, Calif.

The 35-year-old actor appeared on The Tavis Smiley Show the day before and was asked how he is making the climate change issue sexy and attractive for his younger fans.

“How do you make it cool? How do you make it sexy? Well one cool thing about it is that the most underdeveloped, underutilized, under appreciated, undervalued people in the world are our youth. They make up half the population and they’re going to be running the world so why wouldn’t we give them the tools to ultimately be able to do that?” Ian said. “If it takes a vampire soap opera, which has been such a great five years of story-telling that really resonated with this audience and built this audience. My whole thing is… I don’t know how to do very much in the world, but leveraging entertainment value and using social media to create quantifiable global change, that I know how to do.”